From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant,
beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans
the twentieth century
Through his books and his
radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David
Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest
and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor,
sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel
proves him to be the master of an altogether different art
form.
LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE; CHERISH, PERISH
leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an
America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal.
The characters' lives are linked to each other by
acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish
slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago
faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge
on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt
provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream
of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the
casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man
from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual
and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later
tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic
devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle
reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a
marriage crumbles under the distinction between
self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a
man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a
photograph he discovers in an old box—an image of pure and
simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly
conceived work.
Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the
necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel
far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff
"magnificent," a word that perfectly describes this
wonderful novel in verse.
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